My strategy for covert ambushes is just to run. If you outfit your dudes with lost grenades, it helps also.

You can usually beat in ADVENT to an exit because they'll do stupid things like, you know, cover and shielding and other daft shit. While you just beat feet to the LZ. Chucking a lost grenade behind you and watching them get eaten is also fun.

Yeah. That's what I do too but these guys had the bad luck to run straight into a patrol on the way and got pinned down between them and Lost, and I hadn't given them a Lost grenade. But they kept running after getting chewed up some. Fun.

Took out the assassin just now despite being so tired I can barely keep my eyes open and I accidentally took 5 soldiers instead of the 6 I could- and I convinced myself I hadn't bought the second squadsize upgrade.

The assassin does not last long when being double-tapped in the face with a shotgun by my ranger with a +1 shotgun damage research bonus and talon rounds.

Got the last Chosen, it was the Warlock. I kinda miss them, but when they start to get close to a full bar of information, I feel like I really want to take them out. Feels like the rest of the game is the same as the pre-xpac endgame, but I will see.

Got the last Chosen, it was the Warlock. I kinda miss them, but when they start to get close to a full bar of information, I feel like I really want to take them out. Feels like the rest of the game is the same as the pre-xpac endgame, but I will see.

It is and the avatars feel really lame in comparison. They should have just kept the rumored fourth faction and fourth chosen and made this into a brand new game.

Am I the only one pretty bummed out by this expansion? Yeah it improves the game a little, but the choosen are DLC level additions, and the rest of the stuff was just light implementation of existing mods?

Don't take this wrong, but you seem to be the most joyless person on this board. Like, you are annoyed by or dislike things that even the toughest, most cynical people here kind of love. I have never gotten a clear picture of what you like.

Well it's not a blog, is it? I'm not here to tell you how great my day was.

Some people tend to more strongly associate criticism with negativity than others. I'm sorry if my criticism is getting you down.

You can go to the Prometheus thread and bask in the joy of people disliking my liking of that movie, if you wish? Or all the books I've mentioned liking in the book thread, or whatever floats your boat to let you know I'm a normal functioning jukan who likes stuff, just maybe not in synch with a convention you've internalised to date...

I'm making more of an effort to express my delight of things in sync with my criticism, but it's not something that I naturally lean to when I have a particular point I'm looking to discuss.

It will make me happy it this disclaimer makes you worry less about my aptitude for joy.

I'm going hiking this weekend and have been exuberently preparing for it all week - yay!

/Crazy self justification

Anyhow, I've played hundreds hours of XCOM and XCOM2, I really enjoy it.

But this expansion feels like a collection of small DLC, rather than an expansion. I'm not finding it as different or as unified in its elements as I'd hoped.

It does throw a lot at you early, but I don't think it is much of a problem, especially if you've played the game without War of the Chosen installed.

Personally, I'm a bit put-off by how much easier it has made certain aspects of the game. Unless the Chosen proc certain strengths they tend to be push-overs (like everything late game they just drop when you get skills like Banish) and managing the Avatar progress is so easy that it makes the counter almost pointless as you just have so many ways to counter it. Only reason I've done black sites at all was to nuke down the Rulers.

And I say this as someone who has, generally, been very 'average' at the game. I generally played on normal difficulty, but I've been breezing through Commander difficulty and am likely going to bump it up to Legendary after this run.

For me, the expansion is just that ; it's an expansion. It builds on the base game and adds a lot more options and things to do and 'stuff'. It improves immensely on the base game, imo, and gives it a lot more fun as well as interest.

Now that I have it and I've completed it on 'duff mode', I would say that I think it was priced rather high for what it was, but you'd probably spend that much on a new game, which for enjoyers of XCOM, this is what it is.

I think it depends on how much you enjoyed the original and if you really see yourself going back and playing it for some really cool newness. Let's not also forget the VAST improvements in loading times and whatnot, which I would have paid for anyway !

Yeah, that's gotten really old, REALLY quick. Still not out of the first month as I keep reloading because of RNG and Chosen bullshit. I'm averaging one completed combat every 3 real-times days. So much fuckery early on.

Hearing from you guys about how fucked the late-game is doesn't make me want to continue, either. A thorough balance-leveling pass seems to have been missed.

Yeah, they needed to do something to revise the late game. Either have two more-uber Chosen pop up once you're halfway up the Shadow Chamber tree, or beef up the Avatars, something significant. Having the Chosen weapons in particular lets you absolutely destroy stuff.

Best plan when Chosen are around (especially the Assassin) is to keep your team close together. Not close enough to eat a grenade, but close enough to be able to spot the Chosen after they hit one of your troops and fuck off. Once they are spotted they are easy to wipe out.

I finally got a "Defend the Avenger" mission. That was really fun. It was like a crossover superhero movie using 8 of my team at once. 2 sharpshooters sitting back mauling the equipment with squadsight, while everyone else advanced a bit at a time and beat each pod.

When speaking of the MMOG industry, the glass may be half full, but it's full of urine. HaemishM

Always wear clean underwear because you never know when a Tory Government is going to fuck you.- Ironwood

Who the hell taught you how to write? Fuck, that sentence is like internet transmitted face-attacking knives. Jesus. schild

Loving the hell out of this expansion. I'd been wanting to go back and play again, forgot how good the game is. They added a lot of nice stuff to this.

Wish there was a difficulty between commander and normal though. I started several games as commander, since I've been playing these games for a long time, but ended up getting destroyed in all of them. Eventually had to give up and go to normal difficulty. While I've had a few tough spots, I've passed most missions without anybody dying, and have hit the late stage where my guys are becoming gods among men (Unlike you guys, I really enjoy it when my guys get fully buffed and unstoppable ).

That commander difficulty though, god it hurts.

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."-Stephen Colbert

I think the main criticism you could level about the 'ease' is that the DOOMCLOCK DEATH COUNTDOWN is now absolutely trivial. The missions to set the clock back are too easy and too numerous. On my playthrough, keeping the clock at 2 was just a cakewalk.

And, yes, the Avatars just pale in comparison to the Chosen. They should have been beefed up, since I giggled so hard when they turned up as 'BIG BADS' and we had all the Chosen weapons. They're Psionic, ffs, and by that stage you have a guaranteed crit psionic rifle.

Yeah, that's fair. I remember in my first play through I did have to scramble a few times to keep the Avatar counter from reaching the top. Not really a problem anymore.

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."-Stephen Colbert

The Avatar project becomes literally background noise so long as the chosen and other randomness doesn't chew your roster up too bad.

The chosen are mostly a persistent but not terrible obstacle that regularly shows up unless they roll up really obnoxious combos of weaknesses/strengths. I think they do a good job of forcing you to not ignore them and definitely work better than the goddamn Alien Rulers did.

"The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist." - George Bernard Shaw

I think in my playthrough the Warlock eventually was pretty tough because of Dark Events--he lost his weaknesses and gained a new strength. Plus for whatever reason, he was better at getting to a trooper he'd managed to stun and getting the info off of him.

If they decide to make another expansion that ratchets up the endgame after the Chosen go down, I'd buy that for sure. But I'd just as soon they go ahead and work on X-Com 3, which looks as if it's going to be a TFTD remake of some sort.

(I kind of hope they even go on to make a new version of X-Com Apocalypse--I actually kind of liked that game, though not as much as the first two originals.)

The game has always had a problem of starting hard and becoming easier as you go along, the chosen and their rewards just make this a lot more pronounced. I've been playing the shit out of this since it came out, but I stop before the "victory lap" ending, there's really no point basically when your team is basically The Avengers.

But I for one, after all the blood, hardship, and screaming profanities at my monitor, enjoy taking that victory lap with my version of the avengers (complete with different colored armored outfits and customization for each of my hard earned bad asses).

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."-Stephen Colbert

Fuck yeah. Of course I'm playing it. I like for once that I don't have an absolutely nut-crunching last boss or something. It feels right to the game--you've lost a lot of people, you've struggled through a lot: you want to fucking WIN and send them crying home to mommy.

Finally got over the early content barrage and have a nice campaign rolling. It definitely makes you use your whole roster a lot more than you had to previously, I can never find one of my top six when I need them.